Know Your Threats, Weaponize Your Team

Human induced and natural disasters can grind your business to a halt. To reduce damages resulting from IT downtime, your organization must prepare in advance with the necessary solutions, processes and teams in place. Disaster preparedness begins with accurate understanding of the most predictable and damaging threats. Rank these threats in terms of likelihood of occurrence and potential damages. For instance, earthquakes, tornadoes, storms and forest fires may not occur with the same probability based on the geographic location of your organization. Infrastructure failure, employee errors and cybercrime threats may pose even more threatening risks.

Conduct an accurate assessment of risk levels your organization faces across all threat vectors by working with appropriate departments. The analysis must incorporate expert opinion from all areas of disaster recovery covering all internal and external threats. Understand the needs of your organization to mitigate these threats and aim to optimize disaster recovery execution from a business perspective by asking the following key questions:

• What constitutes a disaster for your company?

• What business factors will force your organization to re-evaluate disaster recovery?